Haunt
by Anjelle
Summary: When someone dies it can be hard to move forward without a proper send off. But sometimes leaving the past buried is a matter of survival. [Halloween oneshot]


It was a bright and clear day like any other when Ace waved goodbye to his long-time companion for what was to be a three week separation. Sabo regularly went on long excursions across the world to do anything from rock climbing to hiking to sky diving. He was a thrill seeker, no adventure too big or too daunting, and Ace could appreciate that—to a point. Thrill seeking by definition was reckless.

Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised when he found out that Sabo hadn't come back. With the hobbies the blond kept maybe he should have expected it. But he hadn't, and no innate understanding of the risks could have prepared him for that.

Six years had passed. They were long and quiet, and six felt more like ten or twenty whenever conscious thought drifted back to the friend that never returned. After the first year the pain dulled, always there but no longer carrying with it the same venomous sting it had before. But in recent years it began to resurface and fester, and after so long he was finally ready to put it to rest.

Maybe if Sabo had fallen off a cliffside, or if his parachute malfunctioned, there would have been a sense of closure. Maybe then his body would have been recovered and buried and all those lingering emotions would have been buried along with it. But it wasn't. It didn't.

Sabo was cave diving. And for all that Ace knew, his body was still down there, somewhere. Maybe no more than a skeleton in a wetsuit floating against the roof of an unexplored cavern. That didn't sit with Ace, not at all.

Cave diving was a harder, more technical skill than Ace thought it would be back when he first got into it near a decade before. He and Sabo met while taking the same beginners class; it was a sport that held a lot of history to them. Usually they were partners in their dives, Sabo acting as his support diver more often than not. But for whatever reason, back then Ace just… hadn't felt up to the adventure. Life was getting hectic, his funds were low and even though Sabo offered to spot him for the travel fees Ace felt too proud to accept. He wished he had.

Ace stood fully-geared over the murky green waters of the vast sinkhole below, the nervousness bubbling inside of him rising up and beginning to fester as he wondered just where to begin. He knew about where Sabo went down but there wasn't much to go on after he descended; he went with a group but vanished at some point, and his fellow divers weren't able to locate him after they lost sight. But more than his anxiety Ace felt a sense of relief. _Finally_. _Finally_ this tragedy would be put to rest. That was the hope, anyway; it wasn't like he was guaranteed success.

This was a long time coming. It wasn't like he hadn't thought to search for Sabo earlier, it was more like… he couldn't muster the courage.

His descent went according to plan just as all dives do. It had been more than a few weeks since his last dive; the sensation felt almost nostalgic. But at the entrance to the underwater caverns he spotted a white sign reflecting off the glow of his torch, a signal to the true start of his journey. In bold black lettering it read: STOP. PREVENT YOUR DEATH. GO NO FURTHER.

Below the all-caps warning read a list of bluntly-worded cautionary tales deterring divers from going any further. It was a haunting image knowing that Sabo, too, would have been met with that sign before descending deeper only to prove those warnings right.

Ace breathed deeply, evenly before proceeding.

The scariest part of cave diving was that there was always something above you, something separating you from rising to the safety of the surface that forced you to acknowledge your own mortality. The only noises around you were of the water bubbling and crackling with your movements, the sounds only further warning you of the great pressures your body was being subjected to. Every dive was a risk. Every minute down there was a minute closer to death, especially at depths like those. Because of that, caverns so deep often housed a few corpses. So for Ace, this wasn't so much a retrieval mission as it was a search. If he could find Sabo then, well… he could devise a plan to bring him back. But the important part was _finding him_.

Visibility was low, silt kicked up from his flippers muddying the already murky waters to only further disorient him, and he was starting to contemplate turning back. He would have to soon, a quick look at his timer warned, and the howls of the ocean were starting to sound overwhelming.

Before he had a chance to go through with his decision he spotted something through the cloud of mud, a dark silhouette confined to the cavern floor. As the cloud dispersed he could make out the still, limp fabrics of an older model diving suit.

He felt his muscles clench and release as he swam closer, grabbing his flashlight and shining it on the suit. The body was caked to the floor and wall by cavern silt, trapping it there with its legs disappearing into the black shadows of the substance. For a moment Ace floated there, taking it in. It was… hard, at first, to gather to courage to do… _something_. In reality his racing thoughts lasted mere seconds before he approached, carefully wiping clean the corpse's goggles, and his heart sank.

Beneath the glass vacant blue eyes stared back at him, surrounded by pale skin and framed by blond curls.

He expected a skeleton. He expected something that no longer resembled the person he was searching for.

Ace's breathing picked up and no longer was the thinking about getting out; instead his thoughts were fixed on untangling Sabo's body from the silt and rock his legs were being crushed beneath. Brushing it off took longer than expected, some of the rock refusing to give, and the odds and ends from Sabo's equipment only succeeded in getting in the way. Finally he felt one of the legs lift free and started work on the other one, knowing that only a little more effort would pry it from its prison and with it freed Ace would be able to attempt guiding the body back with him. That would be harder than it sounded, he knew, but it was an effort he had to make.

He didn't account for the body to float to the surface once freed.

Ace followed the body upward to the roof of the cavern and released hold of his flashlight as he tried to pull Sabo back down, even just a little, to allow him to guide his friend backwards along the guideline and out the way he entered. But every exertion of force was met with failure as the corpse bobbed back up again against his efforts. He checked his gages, reminding himself that time was short and that if he wasn't careful he wouldn't have time to decompress back up to the surface, with or without the body. A thought crossed his mind, one he didn't want to face; he would have to leave recovery for another day. But even as he accepted this he found pulling away a harder task than anticipated. As he reached for his flashlight he found the cord it was attached to entangled with his guideline. He tried to force himself steady as he began the disastrous task of untangling it, it being his only lightsource making the job time consuming and trying. But as he cleared that mess he was met with another, his line beginning to entangle with Sabo's.

His breaths now heavy and laboured and his mind foggy, it was hard to think of a rational solution to the problem. He was beginning to feel the pressure weighing around him and that realisation made him desperate as he began wrestling with the corpse, trying to get his line freed, jostling the body with much less care than he would allow in _any_ other circumstance. The wrestling tired him and only made him further lightheaded. Jerking the body one last time, he froze.

Sabo's head separated from his body at the neck, torn away by the force of the jostling, bobbing in front of Ace's face as it watched him with glass eyes.

Everything felt tight and heavy and his energy left him as breathing became a laboured task. He stared back into those eyes, the strength leaving him even as his hands uselessly continued tugging at the line, never realising that it was freed.

Sabo didn't look very different. He still wore that same smile…

" _You should have come, too."_

* * *

Recovery teams were sent out when Ace's support diver lost track of him. The search was short, lasting three days before the team made it to a dark, narrow cavern more than 200m deep. A body was found floating along the roof of the cavern, back pressed against the rock and mud with a flashlight corded to its suit. Below was a headless corpse with an older model diving suit, floating in the glow of his flashlight.

* * *

 **I wanted to write a few drabbles in the spirit of Halloween, but I didn't really feel motivated to use traditional themes like ghosts, vampires, witches and zombies. I didn't want to make something that came off like a horror movie, either. I've always found that reality itself gives you enough things to be afraid of. So I wrote this inspired by a real life story of a cave diver who died trying to recover the body of a fellow diver who died years before. Imagining being trapped so deep underwater with no one around you and only the light of your flashlight to help guide you is chilling enough, but throw in a dead body? Yeah, nope, I'm okay on land!**

 **Happy Halloween!**


End file.
